Synergy is dead. Dead, I tell you. Dead!

Day 2 of business school — after an opening day spent learning about the case for golf and the case against bolo ties — is dedicated to jargon.

Terms and phrases such as “prioritizing,” “bottom line,” and “let them eat cake” are discussed, explained and prioritized. The bottom line is that there’s cake at the end of the lecture.

Peanut butter + chocolate works. Other stuff? No.And since the 1980s, one of the biggest and best terms used in business has been “synergy,” which is best described as “a bullcrap word used to detail how two or more things are supposed to work together, when in fact they never have and never will.”

Synergy came into vogue in the 1990s and it has sucked since then.

Remember the dot-coms?

Anyone remember when the Zapata Corporation — yes the George Bush, CIA, Kennedy Assassination, Bay of Pigs, etc “oil company” — had turned itself a Houston-based fish oil marketing company that invested heavily into the Internet? They bought a bunch of New York-based literary start-ups, including Word.com.

How’d that work out for you?It didn’t. The Web sites are gone. The fish oil wells are dry. Zapata is now a holding company, which is more business jargon for “a company that doesn’t do anything, other than to own other companies.”

Let’s review: The notion that an Internet dial-up provider could add value to a movie-making, television-network-owning, publishing company never made sense. AOL was dying when it latched onto the deal. Time Warner dumbed itself down to make the deal happen.

We knew it wouldn’t work. Time Warner employees may deny it, but they knew it wouldn’t work. Wall Street, originally excited, took a while to figure out that it wouldn’t work.

And now, the Time-Warner board knows it didn’t work.

Tomorrow: I’m merging At Large with Popeye’s Fried Chicken, with an eye toward the synergy that will result from deep-fat fried poultry and wanton Internet dumbassery.